The battles of Birmingham

Sena Jeter Naslund has proven that she can make minnows swim like whales. In her previous novel, "Ahab's Wife," she hooked a single reference in Herman Melville's "Moby Dick" and pulled up a spectacular story of female triumph, full of transfigured myths, legends, adventure, parody, and tragedy. That remarkable feat of reimagining makes the failure of her new novel, "Four Spirits," all the more surprising.

Once again, Naslund has pursued a leviathan subject, but this time its elements reside in our historical rather than literary memory: the civil rights movement and the violence in Birmingham, Ala., during the 1960s. In a grandiose author's note that some close friend or trusted editor should have prevailed upon her to strike, Naslund writes that "Four Spirits" - after 40 years of planning - will "fill the gap in the landscape of American fiction" still left "despite many documentary and nonfiction treatments." With her new novel, she announces, we finally have the long-awaited "comprehensive treatment of the civil rights struggle." Even Ahab would blush.

There's no pleasure in watching this project sink beneath the weight of its pretension and earnestness. While jumping through trials and triumphs, dozens of bombings, and countless acts of courage, the novel rotates through a schematically organized collection of characters or "types": a white liberal, a disabled woman, a New York Jew, a black vet, an evil Klansman, an abused wife, a black preacher, a Peace Corps volunteer, a middle-class black woman, an angry single mother - a veritable Benetton billboard of the civil rights movement.

Periodically, they pass by some singular landmarks of the mid-1960s: the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church, the speeches of Martin Luther King Jr., the castration of Judge Aaron, or the sit-ins at various diners and buses. These events flare up impressively in the novel, but they don't burn long or provide much light. The characters in "Four Spirits" seem incapable of competing with or even complementing the historical giants and cultural earthquakes of this period, and the novel suffers a pathological inability to distinguish what's interesting from what's irrelevant. For long sections, I felt trapped in the minor details of minor characters while history played on television in another room.

The story revolves around the liberal and romantic notions of Stella Silver, a young woman orphaned as a child and now living with her aunts in Birmingham. Determined to contribute to the struggle for social progress, she gets a job at a night school for black men and women of all ages to get their GEDs. She's in love with a pious young man named Darl, to whom she says things like, "I only seek closeness for warmth, against the chill." Nevertheless, "her palm," Naslund tells us, "loved the unfamiliar grain of the cloth of his trousers, and underneath, the firm flesh of his buttock just beginning to flare."

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